These policies outline the basis on which retainer services are provided:
- John provides software development and other services on a retainer basis to clients.
- He provides services to multiple clients and balances his time between them.
- He tries to meet client schedule requirements but clients realize their schedule requirements may not always be met.
- Clients prepay for retainer periods of between 20 and 40 hours.
- Online activity logs for each client document work activities (in quarter hour increments) and decrement available hours.
- Work continues until prepaid hours are exhausted.
- Clients should arrange additional retainer periods before the current period is exhausted.
- Software projects are optimized by accurately documenting requirements and focusing on one task at a time.
- Clients should document and prioritize engineering requirements in an online project management tool such as Trello.
- Incomplete or unclear requirements or shifting priorities compromise work efficiency and cause tasks to take longer.
- Actual time taken will be logged and decrement available hours.
- At the clients request, John can provide a best guess rough estimate of each discrete task but clients realize that software development is hard to estimate and actual time taken will be logged and decrement available hours.
- Unforeseen complications and incompatibilities will be logged and decrement available hours.
- Verbal or written discussions to clarify or revise engineering requirements will be logged and decrement available hours.
Please see my summary of services and experiences and check out my testimonials.